All Rise...

The Charge

High school can be hell, but being popular can be murder!

The Case

Bad Girls from Valley High is not a film that I hated, although I
didn't like it one bit. I have to reserve my feelings of hate for movies that
offend me to core or generate an inexplicable hostility within me, and Bad
Girls from Valley High did neither. All that it filled me with was apathy
and boredom, some annoyance, and a good deal of sleepiness. Thankfully, there
was a clock in plain view of the screen so that I had something worth
watching.

The movie is like an extremely low-rent version of 1999's teen black comedy
Jawbreaker, which itself was a low-rent version of Michael Lehmann's
classic Heathers, in that it was about
a group of bitchy popular girls that begin offing one another. Now, I'll admit
that I enjoy a teen comedy as much as any other emotionally-stunted 28-year-old
adult male, but Heathers really should have killed the genre—it
took everything said by John Hughes and his brethren during the 1980s,
systemically destroyed it, and effectively had the bleak and brutal last word.
When the success of the Freddie Prinze, Jr. vehicle She's All That triggered a resurgence
in the genre almost a decade later, I was somewhat peeved—I suspected that
all we would get would be disappointing remakes of those '80s films. As it turns
out, I was right. And hardly any of them were worthy substitutes, as proven by
the Heathers / Jawbreaker comparison.

Now we get Bad Girls from Valley High, which isn't even a worthy
substitute for Jawbreaker, though it features one of the same stars,
Julie Benz (Angel's Darla). She plays Danielle, the leader of the bitchy
popular girls at school. How do we know they're popular? Because we get multiple
shots of the girls walking in formation down the hallway (you know, the same
shot we saw in Jawbreaker, only now Benz gets to be in front). Her two
friends / followers are Tiffany (Nicole Bilderback, Bring It On) and Brooke (Monica Keena, Freddy vs. Jason); together,
the three of them are responsible for the death of pretty Charity Chase (Tanja
Reichert, Club Dread). As the
one-year anniversary of Charity's death approaches and a new exchange student
moves in on Danielle's love / Charity's mourning ex (the late Jonathan Brandis,
Sidekicks), the girls begin to notice
strange occurrences going on—every day, they age 5 to 10 years. What could
be causing it? A curse? Charity's ghost? The new exchange student? Factor in an
embarrassed-looking Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) as a
hazard-prone teacher and Janet Leigh (Hello Down There) as a mysterious old
woman, and you still won't care.

Some digging over at the Internet Movie Database tells me two interesting
things about Bad Girls from Valley High: First, that that isn't the
movie's original title—that would be A Fate Totally Worse Than
Death, and two, that it was made five years ago and is only now seeing the
light of day. Why that is, I can't speculate (why it's being released, that is;
not why it's been shelved for so long—that answer is obvious). Now, I'll
admit that Bad Girls from Valley High is a much better title; it suggests
something kind of retro and kitschy that I would expect to enjoy. The fact that
it's the best thing about the movie should tell you that there's not much
going on here. This is a comedy without any laughs, unless you find flatulence
and incontinence amusing (as the girls age, they lose control of their bodily
functions. Ha!). It's not even sure from what point of view it wants to
tell the story. The movie is told entirely from the perspective of the three
girls—the "villains" of the story—but we're meant to be
rooting for the young lovers at the same time. Are we supposed to sympathize
with the girls as they suffer and decay, or should we find it funny? Different
scenes seem to be asking totally different things of us. And why are actors who
are pushing thirty years old being cast as high school students? Yes, Julie Benz
is attractive and a fine actress—she's a lot of things, but a 17-year-old
is not one of them. Even Brandis, who was 24 at the time, is a stretch. Watching
these actors try to play ten years younger than their ages is one more
distraction than this mess of a movie can handle.

Universal releases Bad Girls from Valley High on DVD five years too
late and with a new title—the Weinsteins' legacy to the film world. The
film is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, enhanced for 16x9 playback. The
transfer is fine; it's bright and features a reasonable amount of detail, but
makes for nothing spectacular. The Dolby Digital 2.0 audio track fares about the
same, showing some presence while still giving the dialogue its due. The only
extras included are some "hilarious deleted scenes" (as they are
called by the cover art), but I found them to be less than hilarious. When
what's left in is decidedly unfunny, there's little chance that what's cut out
is going to be busting any guts.